ABSTRACT
But what has this to do with information? A first response comes from the postmodern insistence that we can know the world only through language. While Enlightenment thinkers have subscribed to the idea that language was a tool to describe an objective reality apart from words, the postmodernist asserts that this is ‘myth of transparency’ (Vattimo, [1989] 1992, p. 18) because it is blind to the fact that symbols and images (i.e. information) are the only ‘reality’ that we have. We do not, in other words, see reality through language; rather, language is the reality that we see. As Michel Foucault once put it, ‘reality does not exist . . . language is all there is and what we are talking about is language, we speak within language’ (quoted in Macey, 1993, p. 150).
